Search results for "self "
Bogeys - or bodily betrayal
Thursday, 31 July, 2008 - 21:13
Featherstone and Hepworth note how a loss of bodily control can be associated with a loss of social acceptibility - they describe this as 'bodily betrayal'. On ageing, they say:
"Degrees of loss impair the capacity to be counted as a competent adult. Indeed the failure of bodily controls can point to a more general loss of self image; to be ascribed the status of a competent adult person depends upon the capacity to control urine and faeces."I wonder if their analysis extends to what Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT) doctors tend to call 'muck'? Last year as my sinusitis entered its, oh, 3rd or 4th month, my doctor asked if my mucus was discoloured. I said I wasn't sure. Is a green bogey normal or discoloured? Here's something worth meditating on: your snot.
[Featherstone & Hepworth, 'The mask of ageing and the postmodern lifecourse' in Featherstone, Hepworth & Turner, 1991. The Body: social processes and cultural theory, London: Sage, cited in Nettleton & Watson (eds.), 1998. 'An Introduction' in The Body in Everyday Life, London: Routledge, p1-20 (and by the way, isn't that gobful a nice exemplar of the constructedness of knowledge?)]
Do you notice when your snot is clear? Before my doctor asked this question, I had never considered that snot was any colour than green. I mean, snot is normally green isn't it? Aren't bogeys green? Actually, snot is only green when you have some kind of infection (it is a sign of bacterial colonies growing in your nose. Nice). But the rest of the time (like if you have hay fever) your snot is clear. And because it is clear, you don't notice. And by 'you don't notice it' I mean 'I don't notice it'. The clear stuff that came out of my nose when I had a bit of hay fever or early stages of a cold, wasn't 'snot', or mucus. It was invisible, irrelevant. How had I managed to think of snot as only green? What did I think the clear stuff was? I don't even remember. I wasn't even in control of my body to start with.
So when my doctor asked if my 'mucus' was 'discoloured', I thought, 'What - other than green? You mean, terracotta? Puce? Fuscia? Magnolia? Purple? Shit-brown? Or just normal, everyday green?"
I think I'm going to lump this with the rest of my parents' failings, alongside neglecting to tell me about smegma and ejaculation. I don't need to tell you how freaked I was in the bath THAT day.
A History of Madness... i
A new edition of Foucault's A History of Madness (previously translated as Madness and Civilisation) was published earlier in the year, and there has been some notable turbulence in its wake. Foucault, (along with Derrida, Baudrillard, Lacan, Latour, Deleuze, Kristeva) seems often to be a lightning rod for the different sections of the left who were split in the culture wars in the US in the 90s, and more recently for the scientific disciplines' criticisms of contemporary humanities - the lack of rigour, and indeed, the lack of attention to 'reality' itself. Meanwhile those same critics are often referred to by Foucauldian sympathisers, rather disparagingly, as members of 'the reality based community', as though anchoring oneself in an objective world were naive and unintellectual, rather than an obvious choice.
I don't intend to attempt to resolve any of the antipathies here, or even to single out the likeliest candidate for 'correspondence to truth'. This piece of reflection is simply a working through. Much of my time is, besides, spent explaining the relevance of Foucault to undergraduate media students, a task which is itself not without some irony. More to the point, I'm currently embarking on a (currently nebulous) research project, which will involve attempting to unite various domains of knowledge which range from rhetoric, hermeneutics and creativity to health and physiology. As part of my search for and resolution of an appropriate research methodology, it seems a good idea to grasp what it is about Foucault that polarises scholars and their disciplines so much.
In order to complete my bachelor's degree in Eng Lit, I sat, amongst interminable others, an exam on medieval literature, for which I later discovered I scored a distinction. I remember distinctly one of the essays I wrote was a response to a question along the lines of: what is the relevance of medieval literature (I think it referred specifically to Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls) to contemporary society?
I responded confidently with my assertion that the nature of human experience is no different today than it was in the 14th century. While the complexity and number of cultural 'things' may have increased, and there may be more 'units of meaning' in the world today than there were then, though many social values may have changed, though the way society is structured may have evolved - nevertheless, what it means to be a human being has not. We still are born into a world as humans, experience it as only humans can, and die a human death as an unavoidable symptom of living. While there may be worlds of nurture and convention between me, Chaucer, Plato and Ugh the caveman, if we all somehow came together in some timeless place, we would look at each other with recognition.
We are defined, I argued, by our species. The challenges, both philosophical and sociological, involved in living together as creatures with will and freedom, desires and sympathies, have not permuted. The compromises of rule and negotiation are constant; the paradoxes of society and the individual are immutable; the human instinct to compete, and our propsensity towards altruism, do not alter from one generation to the next. Humanity, while it may be a temporary phenomenon on the face of the earth, is in itself an eternal thing. Hence, (I argued with reference to some talking birds), the challenges of Chaucer's protagonists are the challenges of our own brothers and sisters, and therefore of ourselves.
At the time I imagined I got the distinction because my argument was sound. Now I think I got it because my argument was conservative, and met with approval. It was a British answer, sound in the face, back in the early nineties, of French post-structuralists. I remember it must have been 1992 when I got my first lecture on deconstruction, delivered by a young turk of a lecturer, rather than any of the old grandees who prefered to keep their fragrant noses in Shakespeare and Hardy.
It seemed to me that this view was unassailable; and of course, I will now problematise it, though I may still leave it unassailable: the question is not simply, what if I were wrong, but also, how would we know? And even if humanity at base were the same, if we say that social values have changed, how can we dissociate those changed values from measuring whether our nature were the same? What does it mean for two human beings to have a similar nature, but see the world in entirely different ways? Mightn't we just as well be members of different species? If our values and hence ways of apprehending the world metaphysically are incommensurably altered, what can we possibly share, except a physiology, which we're unlikely to bring together, unless by force, since we clearly have no common values through which to court?
In the other, Borges tells the story of how he, as an old man in his 70s, finds himself sitting on a bench with a young man who turns out to be himself, 50 years earlier. As we may think, the child is father to the man, but whether we consider the youth or the elder as the leading edge of a man moving into the transdimensionality of potential, it turns out that nowhere can they commune, or establish a point of common recognition - even with oneself there can be no intersubjectivity:
"Half a century does not pass in vain. Beneath our conversation about people and random reading and our different tastes, I realized that we were unable to understand each other. We were too similar and too unalike... Either to offer advice or to argue was pointless..." (Borges, 1979, p9)
Borges, J. L., 1979, 'the other' in The Book of Sand, (London: Penguin)
Podcasting Will Eat Itself
More Podcasting Will Eat Itself: this time we talk about, mass media, mp3s, barriers to entry and crocheted vulvas. Here's the shownotes:
- mental escher podcast
- area 51 podcast
- Radio Free Calamity podcast
- the Bluggcast
- podbat blog
- Blugg's explanation of OPML
- Duke University's first year iPod scheme
- article in The Independent about Duke University
- Bella Linda crochet blog
- a crocheted vulva
Podcasting Will Eat Itself part 3 mp3
Podcasting Will Eat Itself - Part 2
The second part of the first menticulture podcast.
Podcasting will Eat Itself part 2 mp3
Podcasting Will Eat Itself - Part 1
The first part of the first menticulture podcast.
Podcasting will Eat Itself part 1 mp3
The study of critics
Wednesday, 01 June, 2005 - 14:04
In a book-shop in Hay-on-Wye - in the Cinema bookshop - I pass an aisle and catch out of the corner of my eye a section sign reading 'critography'. Already lost and desperate to find the exit from this maze of aisles and dust, I duck into another aisle and find pointers to the exit.
Outside, I say, "there's a section in there called 'critography' - what the hell is that?" We don't know. "Perhaps it's the art of laying out a bookshop, a methodology of how to categorise books, which has become such a debated subject it has developed its own field of inquiry. Maybe there's even a related field of how to categorise the various schools of thought on how to categorise books. A meta-critography." My companions, however, are nowhere to be seen.
None of us has seen a critography section anywhere before, or even heard of it. Back home I look it up, only to find it doesn't actually exist. This has become an anti-meta-critography.
